KoA: Reckoning - Interview @ Shacknews

Shacknews: There have been a lot of comparisons made from your team and [38 Studios boss] Curt Shilling about what Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is like. We've heard it's a marriage between God of War and Oblivion, for example. Let's examine that because I think there's an impression from players that, since they haven't seen it in action, it's a lot of talk verging on hyperbole. What's the core idea behind Reckoning?Sean Dunn: The core idea behind the game is that it's an open-world RPG. It's a core, hardcore RPG that really is built to cater to those fans of products like Oblivion and Elder Scrolls games. What we wanted to do is, well we were never really satisfied with combat that was offered to open-world RPG players.
The whole team is made up of industry veterans. We have Ken Rolston, he's one of the visionaries who was the lead designer on Oblivion. We have Mark Nelson, who is the creative director here, he was was the lead designer on the Oblivion expansion. Our executive producer was at Bethesda, the system designer from Titan Quest… there's a lot of RPG knowledge in the studio now.
What we wanted to do is pull all of the combat in. We wanted to put combat that's geared in that "simple to pick up, but hugely deep and fulfilling and satisfying" gameplay. We didn't want to over complicate it with memorized combos and things like that. It's all based on single-button combat, based on your weapons, and it's based on your timing. Just like any good RPG those skills and those combo trees that you can execute through the progression of your character.
If you don't want to do in-close, tight combat you can go through a Mage build or maybe do a Hybrid build. Anything like that. It was really bringing fast paced combat into an open-world RPG.